


not date night

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Corny, Dating, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Future Fic, Injury Recovery, Marriage Proposal, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-19 11:14:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14236068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: Coulson helps Daisy recover from an injury - with ice cream and a movie.





	not date night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Persiflage](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Persiflage/gifts).



“Yes! Thank you,” she hurries to take the tub of ice cream and presses it against her cheek.

Coulson blinks.

“It was for eating,” he points out. “But okay.”

“This is… a priority.”

She closes her eyes and lets out a moan as the cold soothes her ache. Coulson considers her bruises, covering almost have of her face. They look worse than they actually are - or so the doctors told him. He also considers her bandaged hand, and the hit she took on her right knee.

“You sure you shouldn’t still be in the med bay?” he asks her, grabbing the blanket and covering Daisy with it. “You took quite a beating.”

“You know I don’t like staying there too long,” she says, opening her eyes slowly. “I don’t like stretchers, and doctors gawking at me and putting needles in me and-”

“Yeah, I know,” he tells her.

Neither are fond of medical environments, given past experiences.

He sits down with her, waiting until she’s relieved the pain with the cold ice cream before gently prying it from her hands and scooping it into the two bowls he’s been holding.

This corner of the new base is basically their own little world; it’s not the official common area (they have a bigger one next to the kitchen), and only Daisy and Coulson (and occasionally Mack, when he wants to play videogames without being interrupted by new recruits in search of his guidance) really use it. It has a microwave and a small fridge, the tv screen and dvd player and that’s about it, tucked away, and Daisy thinks all the other agents assume it’s the Director’s own chillout room - she has done nothing to dispel them of that notion. She likes having somewhere where she can hide for a bit. That normally involves hiding here with Phil.

“How your other hand doing?” he asks.

She lifts her arm, but from the elbow.

“Still broken.”

She hears him sigh a bit, but he doesn’t comment any further.

He gets how important this is for Daisy. That they already made plans for tonight.

Daisy doesn’t want to think about it as a Date Night thing - that sounds old-fashioned but not in a good way. It sounds very heteronormative and dull. It’s not like she and Phil have to force themselves to find time to spend together, no, it’s that they usually need to get a break and unwind at the same time (upside? downside? of spending almost every waking hour together _and_ in mortal danger) and they want to spend it with each other.

“Stop making that face,” she tells Coulson. “Yeah, I should probably still be in the medbay or resting in my room. I’m sorry if I preferred chilling on the couch with my boyfriend and watching… wait, what are we watching?”

“ _The Ninth Configuration_ ,” Coulson says. “It’s by the same guy who wrote The Exorcist.”

“It’s not a scary movie, is it?”

“No. More like a psychological thriller. It’s supposed to be good,” he adds. “And you like weird films.”

She laughs. “What?”

“You made me watch I can’t remember how many Coen Brothers movies.”

She laughs again, softer. The ritual - ritual sounds good, much better some Date Night cliche nonsense - actually started out before they even started dating. This habit of them of eating junk food while watching a movie to forget about the next impending end of the world, on this very couch, well… it’s kind of _how_ they started dating.

Dating sounds like the wrong word for it, though.

“I know you don’t like it when I call you my boyfriend,” she says, realizing he tensed up a bit earlier.

It’s not a big thing, Coulson thinks, and definitely nothing that’s worth upsetting Daisy about but -

“Daisy, I’m middle aged, it makes me feel silly.”

“Well, I was raised by nuns, I’m not calling you my lover if that’s what you were thinking,” she says.

All deadpan. Coulson can’t help but give up a smile.

“ _Partners_?” he suggests.

He thought Daisy was going to like that - he likes the word, it feels less… _heterosexual_ , makes him feel more comfortable than the other options - but her face clearly says otherwise.

“That sounds like we go on missions together,” she says.

“We go on missions together,” Coulson points out.

She gives him a dirty look, her fingers darting for a second over the hip of his jeans. “That’s not _all_ we do.”

Coulson chuckles.

Five minutes in and they are already losing track of what’s happening in the movie. It’s fine. This is what they do to wind down. Coulson remembers a lot of beginnings to many fine movies, while he can’t recall quite as many endings.

They go back to it, for a while, focusing on the screen. It’s pretty good, she has to give him that. Off beat, but he must know she likes films like that.

“I have an easy fix, though,” she tells him, looking at him sideways. Coulson gets the feeling she is sizing him up somehow. “So I won’t have to call you boyfriend anymore.”

Coulson panics for an split-of-a-second (secretly, all the time he’s been with Daisy, like this, he’s just been waiting for the other shoe to drop), thinking she means to break things off. But he sees her expression.

“What?” he asks, in disbelief.

“You know…”

She feels achingly shy all of the sudden, half sure Coulson is going to think it’s a stupid idea, or that she is assuming things about the relationship.

“Oh,” he says simply.

He takes a spoonful of ice cream.

“Okay,” he tells Daisy.

Daisy arches her eyebrow. She knows Coulson would never mock her by saying yes if he didn’t mean it, he wouldn’t pull such a cruel joke on anyone, much less on Daisy. But still. She needs a few moments.

“Yeah?” she tentatively asks, making sure.

He smiles - and it’s one of those soft, tender smiles Daisy recognizes as hers and hers alone.

“Yeah,” he says, then the spoon into his mouth again.

Their gazes dart to the tv screen again, but there’s a different energy now. A tension between them. A current that wasn’t there until a moment ago. They look at each for a moment - but just of of the corner of their eyes. They don’t _dare_ do more. They’d break out in astonished laughter. But the giddiness is palpable. They feel almost high.

“Sorry,” Daisy says after a bit. “You’d probably have preferred me to wait until half my face isn’t purple, and I can move both my hands.”

“No, it was perfect,” Coulson tells her.

“Really?”

Granted, he’s never been proposed to before, but in his non-expert opinion… Plus what does it matter? He’s looking at Daisy’s face right now, being told that she wouldn’t mind if he did that for a while longer yet is good enough. 

He puts his hand over her bandaged fingers for a moment.

“Really.”

Both look away, embarrassed like teenager for a moment. It’s absurd, after all the stuff they have done _on this couch_ (talk about teenager, Daisy thinks, and she isn’t one to talk but hint, hint, it’s a double digit number), that this is what makes their cheeks heat up.

Back on the screen things start getting a bit… intense.

“This movie is dark,” Daisy comments.

“Mmm-uh,” Coulson wordlessly agrees, wondering if he should have picked something lighter for her.

“I don’t want to call you _fiancé_ , though,” she protests, changing the subject - or rather going back to The Subject.

Not missing a beat, Coulson agrees. “No, we’re not country club members.”

“Give me your phone.”

He frowns but his hand is already going, as if of its own volition, straight to the pocket of his jeans.

“Why?”

“Because my laptop is over there and I can’t move and I don’t want you to move,” Daisy tells him, as if what she would need the laptop for is so obvious.

Coulson watches her punch some words or what have you into his phone. He gets distracted watching her, her eyes focused, the serious expression. She’s working a problem out in her head. It’s hard not to stare. It’s always been hard. He used to do it a lot in the beginning - he told himself he was evaluating her as a new recruit, and then that he was just basking in the pride of having made such a discovery, but it wasn’t that, it was just the pure joy of watching her intelligence in action, how her thinking was so different to anyone else’s, or at least anyone Coulson had ever met. He still does that, watch her like this, it’s still fascinating, but the pride he feels is quite different.

“Care to tell me what you’re doing?” he finally asks.

Daisy doesn’t even look at him as she replies:

“Looking somewhere in the area that does civil weddings tomorrow,” she says, in an almost casual voice.

He puts his hand on her thigh. Daisy feels it, warm and solid, and her heart beats faster, _I’m really doing this, uh?_ she thinks, faking it until she makes it, jumping because Coulson makes her feel so much bolder and braver than she really is.

“Daisy, that’s sweet,” he says and Daisy lifts her gaze from the phone. “But I’m pretty sure you need a marriage license for this, and I’m pretty sure those take a few days.”

Daisy stares back.

“You think I can’t produce a fake marriage license from your phone? Do you even know the woman you’re marrying?”

She rolls her eyes and gives him back the phone, muttering something about it being _done_. Coulson stares down at the phone in his hand, in wonderment (he shouldn’t, he really shouldn’t, this is Daisy Johnson we are talking about, she hacked SHIELD from the back of her van in a laptop she won in a bet), and then he stares back at Daisy.

“Come on, it’s melting,” she hands him the ice cream, and then points at the screen. “And I’m pretty sure the warden from _Prison Break_ is a bad, bad dude. I want to see if I’m right.”

“Daisy?” Coulson insists.

She turns to him. He has one of his very-serious expressions on.

“Are you sure about this?” he asks her, his hand still resting softly on her uninjured leg.

Daisy considers him. She always knew, since she was a kid, that she would never get married. That kind of stuff just wouldn’t happen to her. She was already too unworthy, too unclean, by then to ever think…

She rolls her eyes at Coulson. Again. 

“Am I sure I want to marry the greatest guy I’ve ever met?” she throws back at him. “Stop asking ridiculous stuff and eat your ice cream.”

He happily does as he’s told.


End file.
